Addresses by the right reverend Phillips Brooks eBook

Then there is another thing that people are always
thinking, that I hear very often from men, and that
I have no doubt that I should hear from many of you,
one by one. You talk about your earlier religion
as if it had been some sort of a bondage from which
you had escaped. How common it is to hear men,
especially in this region, say: “I would
be, perhaps, religious, except that there was so much
religion forced upon me in my earliest days.
I was driven to church when I was a boy, in those old
Puritan days. I went to school, where they forced
prayers upon me all the time. I was made to be
religious, so now I cannot be religious.”
Was there ever a more dreadful thing than for a soul
to say that, because, it may be, of the unwisdom,
or the imprudence, the overzeal and the mistaken zeal
of other men, we have not got the full blessing of
that rich, open, free life with Christ which the youth
may have, and therefore we will abandon the privileges
of our higher life which is given to us in our manlier
years? It all comes of this awful way of talking
as if religion were the duty and not the inestimable
privilege of human kind. The Christ stands before
us and says, “Come to me.” You say,
“Must I?” And He answers, “You may.”
He will not even say, “You must.”
You may. And duty loses itself in privilege, and
the soul enters into independence and escapes from
its sins, fulfils its life, lays hold of its salvation,
becomes eternal, begins to live an eternal life in
the accepted and loving service of Christ.

Now just one word, my friends. If this be so,
whether you to-day are ready to make Christ your master
and your friend or not, do not, I beg you, let yourself
say that it is a silly or unreasonable belief, thus
to know of a spiritual presence which is here among
us, in which God is really in humanity. Do not
let yourselves say, my friends, that the man who gives
himself to Jesus Christ and earnestly tries to enter
in deeper and deeper into his life and tries to do
his will, that he may know the Christ and know himself
in the Christ more and more—­dare not call
that brother a fool, as you have sometimes called
your Christian man who watched scrupulously over his
life and prayed, yes, prayed, the thing you think
perhaps the foolishest thing that man can do, the thing
that is the most reasonable act that any man does
upon God’s earth. If man is man and God
is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful
thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.
When a man for the first time bows down upon his knees
and prays, “Oh! Christ, come unto me, reveal
Thyself to me, make me to know Thee, that I may receive
Thee, make me to be obedient that I may take Thee
into my life,” then that man has claimed his
manhood. I beg you, I implore you, I adjure you
that, if you be not ready to be Christian, you at
least will know that the Christian life is the only
true human life, and that the man who becomes thoroughly
a Christian sets his face toward the fulfilment of
his humanity, and so for the first time truly is a
man. “As many as received Him,”—­so
the great Scripture word runs of this Christ of whom
we have been talking,—­“As many as
received Him, to them gave He power to become the
sons of God.”